


water you doing?

by Julx3tte, nicole_writes, paperpenpal, sunnilee



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Does it count as having a beta if there are four authors...?, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Mutual(?) Pining, Sexual Tension, Sylvain Jose Gautier Being An Idiot, Unrecognized pining, shower shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24844198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Julx3tte/pseuds/Julx3tte, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicole_writes/pseuds/nicole_writes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperpenpal/pseuds/paperpenpal, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunnilee/pseuds/sunnilee
Summary: Ingrid's shower is clogged so it's only natural that she's borrowing Sylvain's. Sylvain doesn't handle this very well. / a collab project born from a crazy conversation on discord.
Relationships: Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 17
Kudos: 100





	water you doing?

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was born from the four of us giggling about the way that both Ingrid and Sylvain (but mostly Sylvain) would react poorly to discovering they have feelings for each other, especially as seen in their A Support versus their A+ Support. It was inspired by [nicole_writes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicole_writes/pseuds/nicole_writes)'s [Roommate AU](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1781311) and instigated by [Jul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Julx3tte).
> 
> On behalf of all of us, please enjoy our nonsense  
> \- Nicole

Things were fine yesterday. Ingrid has been using his shower all week because hers is clogged with hair and they haven’t had time to buy a snake.

But today, he can’t stop thinking about the fact that she uses his shower. Her shampoo is sitting in the corner mixed with his stuff, and–he tries not to think about it too hard–she has been _naked_ there.

It gets even more awkward when she comes out of his bathroom in just a towel.

Normal Sylvain, the Sylvain that has been her friend and roommate for years, would have made a joke. Real-life Sylvain doesn’t make a joke. Real-life Sylvain almost chokes on his tongue when he looks up from his desk and sees Ingrid casually leaving his bathroom wrapped in a towel that does absolutely nothing to help him not lose his goddamn mind. 

He manages some terrible, twisted coughing sound that makes Ingrid pause and stare at him. One hand lands on her hip, displacing her towel half an inch, and she furrows her eyebrows. Sylvain drops his gaze back to his desk immediately and flips a page in his book, hoping that maybe she’ll just _leave_. Of course, she doesn’t and she’s still staring at him when he forces himself to look back at her. 

“Are you okay, Sylvain?” she asks tentatively, still standing in his room wearing a goddamn towel like it’s the most normal thing ever.

“Fine!” he says hurriedly, clearing his throat so that his voice doesn’t crack like a prepubescent boy who’s never seen a very nice, very toned set of legs before. 

She frowns and adjusts the top of the towel. “You’re being weird.”

And then mercifully, she continues on her path and leaves his room. Sylvain drops his head to his desk almost immediately with a resonating thunk. He’s pretty sure he’s going to die. His ears are hot, he feels like he has a fever, and he’s not even going to mention the other issue that has, well, arisen. 

It’s just Ingrid. She’s his friend. This absolutely shouldn’t be weird. But it is. It is absolutely one-hundred percent _weird_. And it’s entirely his fault that he yelps like an actual child when she reappears in his doorway, still wearing a towel, to grab the comb that she forgot in the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” he blurts.

She raises an eyebrow and waves the comb at him. "Getting a comb?"

He winces and touches a hand to his forehead. "Right."

Maybe if he makes himself look annoyed, she’ll leave and he won’t have to deal with how weird it is that she is _still_ only wearing a towel. 

“You’re still being weird. What’s wrong?” Ingrid asks, tugging the comb through her hair. 

Sylvain is pretty sure it’s a miracle that the towel stays on. He takes a minute to thank the universe for physics as the power of friction is currently the only thing keeping the towel folded around her. 

“Nothing.” He says quickly, voice very high.

Ingrid throws him a suspicious look but mercifully leaves it alone and walks out of his room.

He rubs his face with his hands. Ingrid is hot. He has always known that. She was a cute kid and she’s been attractive since he was 15 and she was 13. But, living with her has never been weird until he had realized that her toothbrush had ended up in his bathroom and he had accidentally grabbed her body wash while taking his own shower. That kind of thing should have been totally normal, but it doesn’t feel normal anymore. 

Instead, his stomach flips and he wants to lock his door just so towel-wearing Ingrid, who makes him feel very weird things, can stop walking in on him trying, and failing, not to be incredibly miserable. 

She’s right though. He’s definitely the one making it weird and he just wants it to _stop_.

* * *

Sylvain is being weird again. She’s been borrowing his shower because her drain is clogged. It’s absolutely no different from the time where his showerhead broke last summer and he ended up using hers for almost a month, but he’s being so _weird_ about it. 

Ingrid knows she’s tidy, she’s always taken pride in that fact, so she’s not sure why he’s being weird. Sure, she may have migrated a few of her things to his bathroom including her shampoo, her conditioner, her body wash, and even her toothbrush and toothpaste, but at least she keeps her stuff clustered together and out of the way of Sylvain’s three different and mostly empty bottles of shampoo, his shaving cream, as well as his numerous hair products. He’s the messy one in this interaction, not her. 

But, that still doesn’t explain why he’s being so weird about it.

She had tried asking him, but he’d just clammed up and refused to look at her. She tries a few different tactics over the next few days when she needs something from his bathroom. He reacts like Normal Sylvain when she enters in her pyjamas. He doesn’t comment on anything when she pulls her hair up. But when she goes in to take a shower he always, without fail, physically leaves his room and that is decidedly not Normal Sylvain. 

Ingrid vows to buy a snake the next time she leaves the house because she’s really sick of him being weird. Of course, the store is sold out of both drain cleaners and the stupid snakes when she tries to get one. 

Sylvain offers to drive across town to pick up a bottle of drain cleaner on his way home from work, but Ingrid points out that the chemical cleaners are way worse for the environment and manages to convince him to wait for the snakes to come back in stock. 

It has nothing to do with the fact that his water pressure is better than hers. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Sylvain’s ears turn a curious shade of red whenever she wears shorts or a skirt around the apartment and, if he happens to look frustratingly adorable…

Well, so be it.

* * *

The next time it happens, it’s even worse. 

Sylvain is minding his own business, sitting in front of the TV idly and browsing through the channels for something he can watch when he hears the keys turn in the lock. A quick glance at the time tells him Ingrid’s kickboxing class is over. Then, there’s the heavy thud of a gym bag and a quick: “I’m using your shower for the next 20 minutes, so if you have to take a dump, go to Felix’s room.”

He blinks twice and then she’s disappeared into his room, water already running. Seconds later, his mind starts wandering and he quickly goes back to flipping through channels to occupy his brain with something that is decidedly _not_ blonde and _not_ currently getting naked in his room without him–

He whips out his phone and double-checks if there are _any_ stores within a 20-mile radius he can buy a snake from. As he’s frantically scrolling, Ingrid’s voice yells at him from inside of his bathroom, and he startles so hard that he drops his phone.

“Dammit! Sylvain, I forgot a towel. Can you go bring me one so that I don’t get the whole apartment wet?”

He might not mind–the apartment getting wet, that is. _Not_ that he wouldn’t mind seeing Ingrid walking out of his room dripping– _STOP._ He slaps himself on the cheek to snap out of it.

Without responding, he jumps up to get a spare towel from the hall closet. It’s not like he hasn’t done this before. _In and out, quick and easy._ _Nothing to choke up over,_ he tells himself. _In and out, just like-_ he slaps himself again before walking up to the bathroom

Towel in hand, he opens the door a crack, only to see her head sticking out from behind the shower curtain. 

Despite his best efforts, he can still sort of make out her silhouette behind his shower curtain. It’s torturous. He almost wishes he wore his glasses today, so the steam would’ve prevented him from seeing anything at all. 

But it’s too late. 

He’s wearing his contacts and it’s probably ingrained in his mind forever now. 

Based on her posture, and the way that she pulls the curtain a bit further closed when he opens the door, there is an almost one hundred percent chance that she’s actively naked. Ingrid is naked. Ingrid is naked in _his_ bathroom. It is a fairly obvious assumption. It’s not like she had been pretending to shower this whole time.

But, the reality of a naked Ingrid in the same space that Sylvain also commonly occupies without clothes and only something like six feet away from him kind of breaks his brain. He tries very hard not to imagine that they could both be there at the same time. He fails. Miserably.

He drops the towel immediately and shuts the door.

“There,” he says, his face horribly flushed. “Towel.”

It’s probably the least eloquent thing he has ever said in his entire life, but his brain has been completely vacated by all of the knowledge that he has collected over the 26 years he has been a human being. 

He hears her huff on the other side of the door. “That only helps a bit,” she complains. “I still have to walk across the room to get it. You could have brought it over to me.”

Sylvain tries to banish the image tattooed on the inside of his brain of the hazy silhouette of his very naked, very attractive friend. 

“Nope! I, uh, have to go grab the mail,” he lies. 

He immediately walks away from the door and slaps his hands against his cheeks. They’re still burning hot and he’s kicking himself for the stupidest lie he’s ever come up with, in the history of ever. 

Especially when he sees today’s mail on the kitchen counter: right where Ingrid put it before she left for kickboxing.

* * *

It gets so bad that Ingrid showers at the gym once. She comes home with wet hair loosely pulled back into a ponytail. The apartment is empty, shockingly, and she feels annoyed that she lugged all of her stuff to the gym with her only for Sylvain to not even be home when she gets back.

She is too sore from her workout to deal with cleaning or putting stuff away at the moment, so she just dumps her bag on the floor by the door and flops onto the couch. She pulls her phone out from the band of her leggings and idly scrolls through some of her texts. 

There’s a message from Mercedes about brunch on Sunday and a series of photos of the newest foal at the stable in her riding group chat from Ferdinand. Felix is MIA text-wise and physically, as he can tend to be, but she also doesn’t have any texts from Sylvain to explain his absence from the apartment. 

She fires back a response to Mercedes and glances at the clock above the stove in the kitchen. Sylvain was supposed to have finished work hours ago. He should have been home at least two hours ago. 

One part of Ingrid is actually genuinely worried, but mostly she’s just annoyed that she suffered the terrible and uneven spray of a public shower instead of showering at her apartment because she’s avoiding her roommate. 

She’s about to text Sylvain when the door to the apartment unlocks. She tilts her head and looks as it swings open and Sylvain enters, a blaze of blue in his matching shirt and pants. It’s a tight shirt, and he doesn’t notice her looking at him while he hums to a song playing through his headphones. He doesn’t even look up from his phone as he walks through the door.

She can’t tell what he’s humming to, but it’s certainly enough to distract him from the fact that she’s _very_ clearly staring at him. He kicks off his shoes and walks further into the apartment, still distracted by his music and his phone, and walks right past her and down the hall to his room. 

He disappears inside without even acknowledging her presence. She’s almost miffed until he immediately pops back out of his room, yanking one earphone out and blinking at her like he is surprised to see her.

Ingrid raises an eyebrow at him. “Hi?”

He comes out of his room almost shyly. “Hi,” he replies. “I didn’t see you there.”

Ingrid stares at him. There’s something about him at this moment that is different. He leans against the side of his door frame, winding his headphone cable around his hand and he looks relaxed, happy even. His shirt rises up just the tiniest bit above his hip and she can catch the barest hint of the waistband of his underwear. 

Her hands twitch with a sudden urge to run her fingers through his artfully messy hair: to ruin all of the time that he soaks into it each morning. She already knows his hair is soft and she even knows what it would smell like if she were to bury her nose in it because his bathroom always smells like his shampoo or his cologne. Which is, she reasons, fair, considering it is his space. 

“You were out?” she asks, trying to spark a normal conversation between them for once. 

“Yeah,” he confirms. “I went for a late lunch with Hilda.”

Ingrid raises an eyebrow. “I thought you two weren’t going into that territory.”

Sylvain laughs abruptly. “Oh, not like you’re thinking. I lost a bet to her and had to pay for her food. Definitely not date material.”

“I’m glad,” she says without thinking. 

Her mind screeches to a halt. Why is she glad that he wasn’t on a date? She flounders for a second. Sylvain is a very dateable person. He dates a lot of people. He breaks a lot of hearts. Ingrid usually has to deal with the girls whose hearts are broken by her best friend. Maybe that’s why she’s glad. 

She clears her throat. “Less for me to clean up,” she adds as a faint afterthought. 

Sylvain shifts his weight, but he doesn’t comment on her strangeness. Not that he would have any room to, with how he’s been acting regarding the shower nonsense that’s been going on. She could totally turn it back on him, and he knows that well enough to keep his mouth shut. 

He brings a hand up to scratch at the back of his head and Ingrid can’t help but stare at his biceps flexing. She works out a lot–she can appreciate muscles. And Sylvain is cut. He already has practically perfect bone structure and flawless skin, but he’s also annoyingly buff and well-proportioned. 

She shakes her head and drops her eyes to her lap. It’s distracting and weird to think about and she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t want to think about curling her fingers around his bicep or his muscled legs caging her hips against a wall, or worse, against sheets. She digs her fingernails into her palms hard enough that they almost break skin, but the pain does the job in snapping her brain back from the dangerous place it was wandering. 

“I was going to order a pizza tonight,” she says to him. 

Sylvain brightens. “Mind if I hop in on that?”

“Of course.”

* * *

He barely manages to get through the rest of that week without too many other noticeable mishaps. Probably. At least, he _thinks_ he has done a pretty good job. It’s hard for there to be a mishap if you aren’t really around.

It has thrown him off, this thing with Ingrid, and he still has no idea what to do about it. Every time he thinks about it too hard, he ends up flustered and looking even stupider. Honestly, he feels like he’s sixteen again, except this is worse because he had actually been pretty smooth at sixteen. Now he’s just a blubbering mess and the worst part of all is Ingrid’s noticed. 

And he knows that she’s noticed which only makes it more frustrating.

He’s in the kitchen, staring blankly into his cup of rapidly cooling coffee when Ingrid finally confronts him, standing across the island from him. She looks _pissed_.

“Okay, Sylvain,” she starts, sounding calm, but the way she leans forward, bracing her hands on their countertop across from him, says that he’s not going to be able to get out of this one. Her positioning on the other side of the island is perfect to cut off his escape route if he had been going to attempt to make a run for it.

Because it’s not like he’s never done _that_ before. 

“I’ve had enough,” she huffs. “What is going on with you?”

Sylvain takes a protective sip of his coffee, trying to put anything in between him and the irate, irritatingly attractive woman in front of him. 

“Huh?” he tries, his voice a little too high. It’s been stuck like that lately and he hates that he can’t help it. “What do you mean? Nothing’s going on.”

This is the wrong thing to say. The glare that she sets upon him tells him that playing dumb will only make this whole thing worse. 

Ingrid sighs. “Sylvain, how long have we known each other?” she asks.

“What?” he asks from behind the mug.

“How long have we known each other?” she repeats, crossing her arms.

He puts the mug down, furrowing his brow. “Uh, practically our whole lives?”

“Right. Don’t you think I can tell when you’re lying?”

Of course she can tell. She’s _Ingrid_. 

“Look,” Ingrid continues, the sternness in her voice shifting closer to something that’s almost comforting, with a small side of melancholy. “You don’t have to tell me what’s going on but you can’t just pretend that everything’s normal. Please don’t lie to me, Sylvain.”

He realizes, with a jolt, his mistake then. That, somehow, in his attempt to ignore whatever it is that is happening to him, he has accidentally hurt Ingrid. That was never his intention. 

“I’m sorry!” he says a little too quickly, but then he slows, sounding much more sincere when he adds, “I’m sorry, I’m not–I didn’t mean to lie to you Ingrid, it’s just… I’m still,” he hesitates, “sorting this thing out?”

She relaxes a little and nods. “Are you going to tell me what this thing is?”

“It’s just–” he tries, but falters, tongue-tied again.

The look that Ingrid gives him, so earnest and open, and so willing to listen, is entirely the reason why he lets his mouth run, brandishing his patently stupid brand of honesty.

“Thinking about you being naked is really, _really_ distracting!”

There’s a beat of horrible horrible silence and then–

“WHAT?!”

Ingrid, mouth agape, flushes the color of his hair. He’s pretty sure he’s mirroring her. 

“I mean! It’s not like I actually know what you look like naked since we haven’t been like naked together since we used to bathe together as like–I don’t know–kids or whatever–” he rambles quickly. “But, you’ve–” _inhale_ “–you’ve been using my shower and it’s not like I’ve been looking, in fact, I’ve been trying really hard not to look, I–actually, sometimes I have to leave the apartment when you shower or like turn the TV up or distract myself or whatever–but then you like, walk out in a towel? And, Ingrid, your towel is really short. Too short for a normal towel, I think? Because it doesn’t leave much up to the imagination and I guess, actually, my imagination does kind of fill the rest. Where the hell was I going with this?”

She buries her face in both her hands. “I really don’t know Sylvain, but I kind of wish you would stop?” she says, her voice muffled. It rises at the end of the sentence like it’s a question.

His face is burning and his chest is tight, but he’s still able to bristle a little. “I’m being _honest._ Thought you would listen.”

“I _am_ listening!” she insists, still refusing to look at him. “But, this is,” she huffs, “a lot to take in.”

“I mean, it can’t be that surprising, you’re, like, really hot Ingrid.”

“Sylvain,” she groans, finally taking her hands away from her face. She still won’t look at him, instead, she stares straight up at the ceiling. “Where is this all coming from?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she sighs, exasperated, “what changed?”

He stares at her. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know.”

Ingrid finally looks at him, eyebrows furrowed. “Well, something obviously did.”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Your stuff is everywhere. It usually is, but you’re tidy so it’s always been fine. I started seeing your things mixed in with mine and I guess I just realized that it’s different this time? I freaked out once and then I couldn’t turn it off and you’ve just been giving me these _looks_ whenever Felix isn’t around and I really, _really_ didn’t know what to do with that.”

Ingrid’s eyes widen. “Excuse me? I’ve been giving you _looks_?”

He shrugs. “It’s like you’re going to claw my eyes out, but you’re going to do it _after_ you run your hands through my hair.”

He wisely doesn’t bring up the fact that he’d almost had an aneurysm at breakfast one morning after she had come out of her room wearing one of his hoodies.

“That sounds dangerously like girlfriend talk, Sylvain. I’m not your girlfriend,” she replies. 

He decides not to comment on the fact that she never denied staring at him. But those looks were making him _feel_ things, and enough was enough. 

Sylvain lays his cards on the table: “Maybe you should be?”

“What? No. What?” Her voice pitches up and her hand twitches on the countertop.

“Why not?”

“Uh, it would be really weird for one thing.”

“But we already hang out and go out together. It’s literally not any different,” he points out. He has no idea how he’s gotten this far without her reaching across the counter and punching him in the face. By the look on her face, it doesn’t look like she has entirely eliminated that possibility.

“Yes, it is?” she says, her voice still awkwardly high. 

“How?”

“You tell me Mr. Been-On-So-Many-Dates-That-Ingrid-Has-To-Bust-Me-Out-Of-Women-Prison.”

“That’s an excessive statement, Ing.”

“You’re an excessive person, Sylvain.”

Sylvain exhales deeply and takes a moment to think. There really wouldn’t be much of a difference. The only thing he did with the women he dated was– _oh_. 

“Look, the only difference maybe is that we might sometimes make out. We could just try it?”

Ingrid looks at him incredulously. “You think we should make out to figure out if we should date? Are you _kidding_ me?”

“If it goes well, then we date, and if it doesn’t, we will never speak of it again.”

She crosses her arms. “Take off your shirt then.”

“What?” He stares at her. She doesn’t budge.

“This whole time you’ve been thinking we should make out because you saw me come out of the shower a few times. Give me an incentive to accept your proposal. Take off your shirt.”

She’s so business-like that it catches him off guard. “Uh, okay sure,” he mutters.

He begins to strip off his shirt, but partway through lifting it up above his stomach, Ingrid interrupts him: “Slower.” 

He complies. 

Once he has removed his shirt, he holds it dumbly in one hand and just kind of stares at her for a minute. Her eyes noticeably sweep across his chest and he almost feels like putting the shirt back on and just walking away from the conversation. Thankfully, Ingrid seems to have made up her mind as she drums her fingernails over the counter with a series of clicks. 

“Okay, I’m in.”

* * *

Kissing Sylvain isn’t what she expects it to be like. She’s always had this split idea of him. Most of the time he’s just Sylvain: one of her best friends and someone she trusts with her life. He’s loyal, intelligent, and responsible.

Sometimes, he’s Sylvain the womanizer, and she’s wondering what black magic rituals he does to get so many women to go out with him because just spewing out cheesy line after cheesy line and hitting on anything that moves can’t possibly work as well as it does, can it?

But it does. It really does, and it’s _infuriating_.

To be fair, he has always had a nice body. They’d already been through the awkward phase in high school where they were realizing that other people’s bodies could be, well, _nice_. But Ingrid has never thought it was enough of a reason to kiss him.

But now, with one of his hands covering her hip and the other cupping the back of her neck, the flutter in her stomach is unfamiliar and new and absolutely exhilarating. 

She doesn’t know what to do with her hands, so she touches the back of her knuckles to his cheek. Ingrid thinks she must have done something right because Sylvain responds by pulling her in by the waist and sliding his hand to the small of her back like he’d been waiting for this moment.

Her heart skips a beat.

This is an experiment: a _mature_ and _responsible_ kissing experiment with _tongue_ that’s supposed to help them figure out this weirdness between them. It’s yet another dumb idea he’s had–one of many in the last three years–the first of which was that they should live together.

Still, out of all of those ideas, maybe this one isn’t so bad.

What surprises her the most is how delicate he is. It feels like everything he does has been carefully weighed and assessed and it makes her feel cared for. It exposes her too. Ingrid, from the not-unreasonable kissing experiences she’s had, prefers simplicity. She doesn’t need to be swooned or swept off her feet. 

But when Sylvain’s warm hand brushes against the cool skin of her back under her shirt, she starts to realize that she might want more of this than she had previously thought. 

Before his hands can explore any further–before she lets them–Ingrid pulls back.

They both stare. 

Sylvain looks _mussed_. He’s breathing heavily and he backs up, sneaking around the corner of the island they are leaning against, hiding his waist from her. She snorts. She knows how male anatomy works and she’s certainly not stupid enough to pretend like she didn’t know what Sylvain’s reaction could be. Something flips in her stomach at the realization that _she_ has made him feel this way. 

“That was,” she starts, but drops the sentence halfway through. She doesn’t have words to describe it, but it was definitely not weird. It had been suspiciously comfortable. She bites her lip. Sylvain may have retreated, but she can feel the glow of her cheeks lingering. 

“Yeah,” he mumbles breathily. “Was that weird? Did it go okay? Are you okay?” Sylvain stammers. “Do you need water? Anything?” His voice pitches up and Ingrid blinks.

Was she okay? 

“I don’t know,” she whispers. Her body feels like it’s buzzing, thrumming with energy of an unknown origin. 

She takes a careful step around the island towards him and his shoulders tense, but he manages not to retreat. She can’t help the glance she steals towards his hips and it’s evident that she still holds some not-yet faded effect on him. 

It’s a point in his favour that he doesn’t pull away when she reaches for his hand. She entwines their fingers and stares at their hands. She’s held Sylvain’s hands dozens of times because, as he said, they’ve known each other their whole lives. It’s never felt like this before. She’s never had this flutter in her chest that makes her want to rock forward onto her toes and indulge in him and take whatever he’ll give her. 

“Ingrid,” he says quietly, sounding almost pained. 

“I think,” she begins, “that maybe I was distracting you when I was using your shower.” He stares at her. “But,” she continues, “it’s been really hard for me not to be distracted by you in return.” Sylvain gapes. 

Ingrid rests the hand not holding his on the bare skin of his stomach. His muscles twitch under her touch. She trails the point of a finger down between the creases on his abs to the waistband of his pants. One finger hooks in the elastic of the waist and she pulls it out a centimetre. Sylvain’s breath catches audibly and Ingrid feels like she has been possessed. She has literally never been this bold in her entire life. 

She lingers for a second before she draws her hand back up his stomach, letting his waistband snap against his skin. Sylvain’s hand abruptly drops hers and he snags her wandering hand. He backs her up against the island. He no longer looks confused. He looks annoyed. 

“Ingrid.”  
  
She presses her lips together to hide a smile. “You’re really hot too, Sylvain,” she murmurs. The counter is digging into her back and she tries to shift outward. 

Sylvain matches her movement, sliding a leg forward to pin her in place. He drops his head forward so it lands on her shoulder, exhaling slowly. She can feel the heat radiating off of his body as he breathes out. 

“You’re _killing_ me here, Ing.”

Her heart thuds as his hands land on her waist, fisting in the fabric of her shirt. He draws it up an inch and waits. She lifts one hand and slides it through his hair. It’s infuriatingly soft. 

“Date me,” he blurts. He hasn’t moved his head so she can feel him wince in response to his own statement. “Please,” he mumbles as an afterthought. 

Ingrid tugs on the hair at the nape of his neck, guiding his head back. She tips her head to the side and tries not to feel dizzy from the feeling of their bodies pressed together. She trails a finger along his cheek and watches pain and something heady twitch on his face. 

“You wanted to make out with me to see if it would be different. Was it?” she asks him. 

Sylvain’s eyes are burning into her now. “It was different for me.”

Ingrid channels every confident cell in her body into a faint smile as she holds eye contact with him. “It was different for me too,” she agrees. “But we might have to try it again. Just to be sure.” 


End file.
